�No, no, girl, that won�t do! You must listen! You know where I am, but you must also know what I am doing.�

Lilith gritted her teeth and tried, but listening seemed to have become a much more complicated task than it had been only a few weeks ago. She was being asked not only to hear the sounds her mentor was making, but to identify each and every one as she made them and use them to judge distances, directions, actions being taken from them. It was exhausting and frustrating to say the least.

After ducking a swung blow to her head, Lilith dropped into a crouch to avoid a high kick. A swift backwards roll brought her to her feet, and out of range for the immediate moment.

�Good, girl, but it�s not enough just to dodge and avoid,� the shorter woman panted, �you must also be able to attack.�

Fighting was new to Lilith and she was having trouble coordinating attack and defense. One or the other she was doing pretty good at, but switching smoothly between the two was proving more difficult than she had first supposed. The transitions were, at present, accompanied by a severe thumping and grumpy scolding from her teacher. So she had settled into a practice of letting her opponent tire herself out and only then switch to the attack, when Mahkree was too tired to retaliate or take advantage of any openings Lilith left exposed. The problem with that, as Mahkree was only too happy to point out, was that her fights were taking too long. In any real situation security would arrive and slap her in restraints long before the fight came to any definitive conclusion.

�I can attack, just not well,� Lilith responded.

Mahkree held up a hand to stop the match and her charge took a moment to rake damp blond strands from her face. �That�s because you�re trying to flight like me,� was the acerbic comment. �Look at you, girl! You�re built like a great hulking Wookiee compared to me. You need to use your size and strength to your advantage.�

�But I haven�t any great strength,� Lilith protested weakly. �I�m a pilot, for star�s sake!�

�Why the kriff do you think I�ve had you lifting and hauling all this time, girl?� Mahkree asked in exasperation. �If you aren�t twice as strong as when I first saw you, I�ll eat that flying shoebox of yours.�

Lilith tugged at her tanktop, pulling sodden fabric away from sweaty skin, and shook her head. �But you haven�t shown me how to use it,� she almost whined. Lilith hated whiners, and detested herself for it, but she really couldn�t think of anything else that she could do just then.

�Look at me, girl! I�m not a kriffing lightpole like you. I�m small, I fight small. You need to teach yourself how to fight big.�

Lilith closed her eyes and smothered a sigh by taking several deep breaths. �More work with the dummy then?�

�Maybe you aren�t as dumb as you look.�

Having made this deflating declaration, Mahkree marched away and left Lilith alone in the small gym. After pondering the viability of sneaking away instead, the tall blond wrestled the lightly padded sparring dummy out into the center of the mats. She had to admit that it was much easier than when she�d first started.

She still didn�t know why the small woman from Dantooine had taken her under her wing. Lilith hadn�t been looking for help in that cantina. She hadn�t been looking for trouble either, but it had found her none the less, in the form of a belligerent Rodian who�d thought the young woman looked like easy pickings. Simply standing up from the booth bench to her full towering height had put the trouble maker in enough doubt about the outcome of any fight that he backed down when she gave him the chance.

As soon as he was gone, Mahkree had seated herself at Lilith�s table as if they were old friends. No one else had bothered them after that. �It�s not always enough to just look tough, girl,� she had said. �Sometimes you have to be tough.�

That had been nearly a month ago. Since then Lilith had been run ragged, manually hauling cargo containers, running messages, learning martial arts katas, sparring with Mahkree, and practicing, continually practicing with the dummy.

Working her way through hand techniques and combinations, Lilith tried to let thought go, to work on instinct. Mahkree was continually saying, �If you have to stop and think about it, it�s too late, and you�re dead.� Of course, she was also always saying, �Stop and think, girl! Use your head for something other than a hat rack.�

Unfortunately, not thinking didn�t seem to work any better than the fierce concentration she�d been trying in the recent past. Growling in frustration, Lilith gave the implacable dummy a savage, half-wild backhand and kicked at the sturdy base. After hopping around and cursing herself roundly for being stupid enough to kick a solid object while barefoot, the young woman settled herself in front of the dummy. Standing with her legs slightly apart, hands fisted at her hips, and a stern expression of concentration on her face, Lilith would have been completely surprised at how formidable she appeared at that moment.

//If this was a shipping run, or a piloting exercise I could handle it with ease,// she thought ruefully. She�d been thinking up random attacks for the dummy to be making against her, and ways that she could get around it, but what her parents had always taught her, to run, was almost too well ingrained and she wasn�t making any headway. //If I were in the Scorpion I�d juke right, duck the ranging fire and hammer away with the dorsal turret as I raced past. Mick could handle the yoke while I worked fire control.//

The battered little astromech she�d picked up recently, she couldn�t afford one of the newer R2 models and had settled for an M1 decommissioned military droid who had been hobbled combat wise for commercial use, could no longer operate the weapons he had been designed to be a whiz with. It was near the top of Lilith�s list of 'things to get done soon' to find a good code slicer and get that fixed. It wasn�t right to create a droid to do a specific task and then put in a code block to prevent it from doing just that. It was cruel. Besides, Lilith could use all the help that she could get with her new weapons suite.

*And why isn�t this like a shipping run?* her inner voice asked. *Who said is wasn�t?*

Lilith literally blinked in surprise as the thought registered fully. Her body wasn�t a light freighter, and the dummy wasn�t a pirate�s assault shuttle, was it?

The voice remained silent, having already delivered its message.

//I suppose that there really isn�t any reason why I can�t think of it in those terms. Can�t hurt worse than anything else I�ve tried.//

Lilith stepped up to the dummy�s control panel and set it to the attack sequence she had been trying to thwart. //No reason not to try it for real from the get go. At least I�ll know immediately whether or not this will work.//

The bleached blond stepped back and waited until the dummy tested all its servos and beeped that it was ready. Lilith slid closer, just into attack range, and hesitated a fraction of a second for the dummy�s left arm to start swinging. Reacting as she would to a turbo laser strafing run, the fledgling smuggler sideslipped to her right, ducking the swinging appendage. She let her left arm trail behind her as she moved and swung the blade edge of her hand hard against the dummy�s torso as she rushed past it to its unprotected side. Adjusting her thinking to assume the turbo laser batteries couldn�t rotate to cover the shuttle�s aft end, Lilith planted her left foot and let her momentum carry her around so that she was now facing the droid�s back and let loose with a lancing right fist to the back of its head. That was followed immediately with a left to the kidney.

To her delighted surprise, the dummy squawked in distress and lapsed back into motionlessness, signaling its defeat. An amazed smile spread Lilith�s lips. �It actually worked,� she breathed.

�Of course it did, girl.� Lilith jumped and spun to see Mahkree leaning negligently in the doorway. �Now, explain to me how you did it.�

�Why do you say �of course� if you don�t know how I did it?�

The shorter woman rolled her eyes and sighed. �You were bound to figure it out sooner or later. I can see the pain and resolve in your eyes. You�d have found the way or died trying. Now explain it to me.�

�I thought of it the way I would evading a piracy attempt. Gotta cover any vulnerable areas while striking hard at any the enemy might show. Use the advantages your ship has, be they speed, size, shield strength, whatever.�

�Well, it worked on the dummy. Let�s see how well it works on a real person.�

Mahkree stepped onto the mats and her student started to remove the dummy. �No, leave it. You won�t always have a clear fighting area. You�ll have to keep in mind where it is and fight around it.�

Lilith grinned. She had an advantage there. She always knew where things around her were, and things that didn�t move were even easier to keep track of. �Okay, here goes.�

*******

Lilith held the bacta patch carefully to her tender black eye, but she was grinning because Mahkree was gingerly attending to a matching shiner of her own. It had worked. She�d just had to think in terms she could understand.

�You�ll do, girl,� Mahkree told her with no trace of grudging. �A couple more weeks and I�ll feel safe letting you loose on the galaxy at large.�

�Why�d you decide to teach me, anyway?�Lilith asked curiously.

�Someone once brought me in and taught me, girl. That look in your eyes at the cantina was so like what my own must have been. That half scared, half eager look covered with a blank, stern face. I was just like that once, until a wonderful woman took me in and knocked some sense into me. I�ve also seen the desperation, the lingering pain you carry around, girl. I won�t ask, it�s not my place, but you sort that out and you get on with life. Don�t let the past keep you from enjoying your present or your future.� The shorter woman stared her right in the eyes and nodded in approval at what she saw there now. �You want to pay me back, you do the same for some poor girl who don�t know how to make a proper fist. You teach her right and then you let her go on her way.�

Lilith nodded solemnly. �If I ever find her I�ll see that she�s ready for whatever the galaxy can throw at her.�

�You�re going to be unstoppable when I�m done with you. I�m almost afraid of how good a teacher you might be.� Mahkree gave a hearty laugh. �Force preserve us if she�s as Corellian as you are.�